The Troubled Man (2011)

by Henning Mankell

  Death always causes havoc, no matter when it comes.

  He dialled the number, and noticed that his hand was shaking. Linda answered.

  ‘You again? We just hung up. Is everything all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. Are you alone?’

  ‘Hans is busy changing a nappy. Didn’t I tell you I gave him an ultimatum?’

  ‘Yes, you did. Listen carefully now - you might want to sit down.’

  She could hear from his voice that this was serious. She knew he never exaggerated.

  ‘Louise is dead. She committed suicide several days ago. She was found last night or this morning at the side of a woodland path where they’d been clear-cutting in the Varmdo forests.’

  She was dumbstruck.

  ‘Really?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be any doubt. But there’s no trace of Hakan.’

  ‘This is awful.’

  ‘How will Hans take it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Are they completely certain?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have called if Louise hadn’t been identified, obviously.’

  ‘I mean that she committed suicide. She wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Go and talk to Hans now. If he wants to speak to me he can call me direct. I can also give him the number of the police in Stockholm.’

  Wallander was about to hang up, but Linda wasn’t finished.

  ‘Where has she been all this time? Why did she take her life only now?’

  ‘I know as little about that as you do. Let’s hope, in the midst of all the tragedy, that this can help us to find Hakan. But we can talk about that later.’

  Wallander hung up, then called Niklasgarden. Artur Kallberg was on holiday, and so was the receptionist, but Wallander eventually managed to get hold of a temp. She knew nothing about Signe von Enke’s background, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was talking to a brick wall. But maybe that was an advantage under the circumstances.

  Wallander had barely finished the conversation when Hans von Enke called. He was shaken, and close to tears. Wallander answered all his questions patiently, and promised to let him know as soon as any more information became available. Linda took the phone.

  ‘I don’t think it’s sunk in yet,’ she said quietly.

  ‘That goes for all of us.’

  ‘What did she take?’

  ‘Sleeping pills. Ytterberg didn’t say what kind. Maybe Rohypnol? Isn’t that what it’s called?’

  ‘She never took sleeping pills.’

  ‘Women often use sleeping pills when they want to take their own life.’

  ‘There’s something you said that makes me wonder.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did she really take her shoes off?’

  ‘According to Ytterberg, yes.’

  ‘Don’t you think that sounds odd? If she was indoors I could have understood it. But why take your shoes off if you’re going to lie down and die outside?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did he say what kind of shoes they were?’

  ‘No. But I didn’t ask.’

  ‘You have to tell us absolutely everything,’ she said after a pause.

  ‘Why would I hold anything back?’

  ‘You sometimes forget to mention things, possibly because you’re trying to be considerate when you don’t need to be. When will the press get hold of this?’

  ‘At any moment. Check teletext - they’re usually the first to know.’

  Wallander waited, phone in hand. She came back a minute later.

  ‘They’ve got it already. “Louise von Enke found dead. No trace of her husband.”’

  ‘We can talk again later.’

  Wallander switched on his own television and saw that the news had been given prominence. But if nothing else happened to change or complicate the situation, Louise von Enke’s death would no doubt soon fade into the background again.

  Wallander tried to devote the rest of the day to his garden. He had bought a pair of hedge clippers on sale in a DIY store, but he soon discovered that they were more or less unusable. He trimmed a few bushes and cut back some branches on various old, parched fruit trees, well aware that they shouldn’t be pruned in the middle of summer. But the whole time, he was thinking about Louise. He’d never got close to her. What did he actually know about who she was? That woman who listened to the conversations taking place around the dinner table with the trace of a smile on her lips, but very rarely said anything herself? She taught German, and maybe other foreign languages as well. He couldn’t remember offhand, and had no desire to go inside and search through his notes.

  And she gave birth to a daughter, he thought. When she was still in the maternity ward she had been told about the child’s severe handicaps. The daughter they named Signe would never lead a normal life. She was their first child. What effect does something like that have on a mother? He wandered around with his useless hedge clippers in his hand and failed to find an answer. But he didn’t feel much genuine sorrow. You couldn’t feel sorry for the dead. He could understand what Hans and Linda felt. And there was also Klara, who would never get to know her grandmother.

  Jussi limped up with a thorn in one of his front paws. Wallander sat down at the garden table, put on his glasses, and with the aid of a pair of tweezers managed to pull it out. Jussi displayed his thanks by racing off like a flash of black lightning into the fields. A glider flew low over Wallander’s house. He watched its progress, squinting. He simply couldn’t feel like he was on holiday. He could see Louise in his mind’s eye, lying on the ground next to a path that meandered through a felled area of the forest. And by her side a pair of shoes, neatly on parade.

  He threw the clippers into the shed and lay down on the garden hammock. Tractors were hard at work in the distance. The buzz from the main road came and went in waves. Then he sat up. This was pointless. He wouldn’t be able to relax until he had seen it all with his own eyes. He would have to go to Stockholm again.

  Wallander flew to Stockholm that same evening, having handed over Jussi once again to his neighbour, who asked somewhat ironically if Wallander was beginning to get tired of his dog. He called Linda from the airport; she said she wasn’t surprised - she had expected no less of him.

  ‘Take lots of photos,’ she said. ‘There’s something here that doesn’t add up.’

  ‘Nothing adds up,’ said Wallander. ‘That’s why I’m going to Stockholm.’

  His flight was ruined by a screeching child in the seat behind him. He spent nearly the entire journey with his fingers in his ears. He managed to find a room in a little hotel not far from the Central Station. As he walked in the door, the skies opened. He looked out of the window of his room and watched people scurrying to find shelter from the heavy rain. Can loneliness get any worse than this? he suddenly found himself thinking. Rain, a hotel room, me at sixty years old. If I turn round, there’s nobody else there. He wondered how things were going for Mona. She’s probably just as lonely as I am, he thought. Probably even more so, as she tries to conceal all the turmoil that’s bubbling away inside her.

  When the rain stopped, Wallander went back to the Central Station and bought a map of Stockholm. Then he got on the phone and booked a car for the following day. Because it was summer, hire cars were in high demand, and the best deal he could find was much more expensive than he’d hoped for. He ate dinner in the Old Town. He drank red wine, and was reminded of a summer many years ago, shortly after his divorce from Mona, when he had met a woman. Her name was Monika, and she had been visiting friends in Ystad. Their first encounter was at a less than enjoyable dance, and they arranged to see each other again in Stockholm for dinner. Even before they’d finished their appetisers, he realised that it was a disaster. They had nothing to talk about; the silences became longer and longer, and he got very drunk. He now drank a toast to her memory, and hoped that she had achieved happiness in her life. He was tipsy when he left the restaurant and wandered through
the alleys and cobbled streets before returning to his hotel. That night he dreamed once again about horses running into the sea. When he woke up the next morning he dug out his blood sugar meter and stuck the needle into his finger: 100. What it should be. The day had begun well.

  Thick clouds covered the sky over Stockholm when he reached the place on Varmdo where Louise von Enke’s body had been found. It was ten o’clock. Police tape was still scattered around. The ground was waterlogged, but Wallander could see traces of the marks the police had made where the body had been lying.

  He stood there motionless, held his breath, listened. The first impression was always the most important. He looked around in a slow circle. They had found Louise in a shallow depression, with outcrops of rock and low mounds on both sides. If she had lain down here so as not to be seen, she had chosen the right place.

  Then he thought about the roses. Linda’s words, the first time she told him about her future mother-in-law. A woman who loves flowers, who always dreamed of having a beautiful garden, a woman with a green thumb. That’s what Linda had said. He remembered very clearly. But this was as far from a beautiful garden as you could get. Was that why she had chosen this place? Because death was not beautiful, had nothing to do with roses and a well-tended garden? He walked around the site, viewing it from different angles. She must have walked a short way, he thought. From the same direction as where my car is. But how did she get there? By bus? By taxi? Had somebody driven her?

  He walked over to an old hunting stand in the middle of the cleared area. The steps were slippery. He climbed up cautiously. The floor was littered with a few cigarette butts and some empty beer cans. A dead mouse was lying in one corner. Wallander climbed down again and continued walking around. He tried to imagine himself as the person about to commit suicide. A lonely spot, ugly and covered in scrub, a bottle of sleeping pills. He stopped dead. A hundred sleeping pills. Ytterberg had said nothing about a bottle of water. Was it possible to swallow that many pills without anything to drink? He retraced his steps to see if there was something he’d missed. As he studied the ground, he tried to channel Louise. The silent woman who was always willing to listen to what other people had to say.

  That was the moment Wallander really and truly began to comprehend that he was on the periphery of a world he knew nothing about. It was Hakan and Louise von Enke’s world, a world he had never thought about before. He didn’t know what he saw and felt during the time he spent in the clear-cut area; it wasn’t something tangible, nor was it a kind of revelation. It was more a feeling of being close to something he had no qualifications for understanding.

  He left the place, drove back to town, parked in Grevgatan and walked up the stairs to the apartment. He wandered silently through the deserted rooms, collected the post lying on the floor next to the door, and picked out the bills Hans would need to pay. The post forwarding wasn’t yet working. He examined the letters to see if there was anything unexpected among them, but found nothing. The apartment was stuffy and stifling, and he had a headache, probably due to the poor-quality red wine he’d drunk the night before, so he carefully opened a window overlooking the street. He glanced at the answering machine. The red light was flashing, indicating new messages. He listened. Marta Hornelius wonders if Louise von Enke is interested in joining a book club that will start this autumn, to discuss works of classical German literature. That was all. Louise von Enke won’t be joining any book club, Wallander thought. She has closed her last book for good.

  He made some coffee in the kitchen, checked that there was nothing in the fridge starting to smell, then went into the room where Louise had two large cupboards. He didn’t bother with the clothes but took out all the shoes, carried them into the kitchen and stood them on the table. By the time he had finished there were twenty-two pairs in total, plus two pairs of wellingtons, and he’d been forced to use a worktop and the draining board as well. He put on his glasses and started to work methodically through them all, one shoe at a time. He noticed that she had large feet and bought only exclusive brands. Even the rubber boots were an Italian make that Wallander suspected was expensive. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but both he and Linda had been surprised to hear that she had taken off her shoes before she died. She wanted everything to be neat and tidy, Wallander thought. But why?

  It took him half an hour to go through the shoes. Then he called Linda and told her about his visit to Varmdo.

  ‘How many shoes do you have?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Louise has twenty-two pairs, in addition to the ones the police have. Is that a lot or a little?’

  ‘It seems about right. She cared what she looked like.’

  ‘That was all I wanted to know.’

  ‘Do you have anything else to tell me?’

  ‘Not now.’

  Despite her protests, he hung up and called Ytterberg. To Wallander’s surprise a small child answered. Then came Ytterberg.

  ‘My granddaughter loves answering the phone. I have her with me in my office today.’

  ‘I don’t want to disturb you, but there’s something I’ve been wondering about.’

  ‘You’re not disturbing me. But aren’t you supposed to be on holiday? Or did I misunderstand?’

  ‘I am on holiday.’

  ‘What do you want to know? I don’t have any new information about Louise von Enke’s death. We’re waiting to see what the pathologist has to tell us.’

  Wallander suddenly remembered his doubts about the water.

  ‘I have two questions, basically. The first one is simple. If she swallowed so many pills, surely she must have drunk something as well?’

  ‘There was a half-empty litre bottle of mineral water next to the body. Didn’t I mention that?’

  ‘No doubt you did. I probably wasn’t listening carefully enough. Was it Ramlosa?’

  ‘No, Loka, I think. But I’m not sure. Is it important?’

  ‘Not at all. Then there’s that matter of the shoes.’

  ‘They were standing by the side of the body, very neatly.’

  ‘Can you describe the shoes?’

  ‘Brown, low heels, new, I think.’

  ‘Does it seem reasonable that she would wear shoes like that in the woods?’

  ‘They weren’t exactly party shoes.’

  ‘But they were new?’

  ‘Yes. They looked new.’

  ‘I don’t think I have any more questions.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch as soon as the pathology report is in. But it might take some time, now that it’s summer.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how she got out to Varmdo?’

  ‘No,’ said Ytterberg. ‘We haven’t worked that out yet.’

  ‘I was just wondering. Many thanks yet again.’

  Wallander sat in the silent apartment, gripping the phone tightly, as if it were the last thing he possessed in this life. Brown shoes. New. Not party shoes. Slowly, deep in thought, he moved the shoes back into the cupboards.

  Early the next day he flew back to Ystad. That afternoon he returned the faulty hedge clippers to the store he had bought them from, and explained how useless they were. Because he made a fuss, and because one of the managers knew who he was, he was given a better pair at no extra charge.

  When he got back home he saw that Ytterberg had called. Wallander dialled his number.

  ‘You made me think,’ Ytterberg said. ‘I had to take another look at those shoes. As I said, they were almost brand new.’

  ‘You didn’t need to do that for my sake.’

  ‘It’s not really the shoes I’m calling about,’ said Ytterberg. ‘While I was at it I took another look at her handbag, and I discovered a sort of inner lining. You could even call it a secret pocket. There was something very interesting in it.’

  Wallander held his breath.

  ‘Papers,’ said Ytterberg. ‘Documents. In Russian. And also some microfilm. I don’t know what it is, but it’s
remarkable enough for me to phone our Sapo colleagues.’

  Wallander found it difficult to grasp what he had just heard.

  ‘You’re saying she was carrying secret material around in her handbag?’

  ‘We don’t know that. But microfilm is microfilm, and secret pockets are secret pockets. And Russian is Russian. I thought you should know. It might be best to keep this to ourselves for now. Until we know what it actually means. I’ll call again when I have more to tell you.’

  After the call Wallander went out and sat in the garden. It was warm again. It would be a pleasant summer evening.

  But he had begun to feel very cold.

  PART 3

  The Sleeping Beauty’s Slumber

  21

  Wallander had no intention of keeping his promise. He decided immediately that he would talk to Linda and Hans. When it came to a choice between respecting his family and respecting the Swedish security services, he didn’t hesitate. He would tell them, word for word, what he had heard. It was his duty to them.

  Wallander sat thinking for a long time after his conversation with Ytterberg. His first reaction was that something didn’t make sense. Louise von Enke a Russian agent? Even if the police had discovered classified documents in her handbag, even in a hidden compartment, he couldn’t believe it.

  But why would Ytterberg tell him things that weren’t true? After having met him briefly on a couple of occasions, Wallander had every confidence in him. He would never have called if he hadn’t been sure about what he was going to say.

  Wallander knew what he had to do. Trying to protect Linda by withholding facts wouldn’t help her. He must take seriously what Ytterberg had said. Whatever eventually emerged as the truth, it would not show that Ytterberg’s account of the facts was wrong; rather there would - or must - be different conclusions to draw.

  He got into his car and drove to Linda and Hans’s house. Klara’s pushchair was standing in the shade of a tree; her parents were sitting side by side in the garden hammock, cups of coffee in their hands.